Other Funding Opportunities

Research Prizes and Honors

[Have you or a colleague won a research-related prize or honor? Let the Research Alert know.]

UT Chemist Wins Japan Prize for Innovative Semiconductor Materials

C. Grant Willson, professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has won the Japan Prize, an international award similar to the Nobel Prize, for his development of a process that is now used to manufacture nearly all of the microprocessors and memory chips in the world.

He’s sharing the 50 million yen (approximately $560,000 in U.S. dollars) prize with his colleague and friend Jean M.J. Fréchet, who is now vice president for research and professor of chemical science at King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia. The winners were announced today in a ceremony in Tokyo. The Japan Prize Presentation Ceremony and Banquet, with the emperor of Japan in attendance, will take place in Tokyo on Wednesday, April 24, 2013.

Willson and Fréchet first conceived of “chemically amplifed resists,” the materials for which they are being recognized, in 1979. Willson was a researcher at IBM Corp., and Fréchet was spending a year with the company while on sabbatical from the University of Ottawa.

Presenters are Bruce Kisliuk, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office deputy commissioner for Patent Administration, and Kevin Meek, an intellectual property attorney at Baker Botts. They will present patent topics and real-world examples of how to patent university research successfully. Dan Sharp, associate vice president for research and OTC director, will moderate.

Research Funding Available

Funding is available for 2012-2013 Special Research Grants.The awards of up to $750 are made to tenured and tenure-track faculty. Nominations for the University Co-op Research Excellence Awards are being accepted through Feb. 18, 2013.

Training Session on Responsible Conduct of Research to be Held

The training, sponsored by the Office of Sponsored Projects (OSP), is part of an effort by the university to provide undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty who require the training with superior educational opportunities for professional growth. This training has been developed to increase awareness of ethical issues that may occur while conducting research. At the end of this training, participants will have acquired skills that will help identify ethical dilemmas and resources available to you to help.

Quoted-UT Researchers in the News

(The role of Britney Schmidt, a research scientist associate at the Institute for Geophysics, was highlighted in an article about research in Antarctica.)

Planetary scientist Britney Schmidt of The University of Texas at Austin has deployed a small, tethered robotic submersible through the test borehole. Known as SCINI (Submersible Capable of under Ice Navigation and Imaging), it is outfitted with a lamp and a camera. "It looks for everything under the ice," Schmidt told me at her temporary office at McMurdo Station. "There's no reason that I could think of why we would not find interesting organisms."

Protein-based drugs represent some of the most promising therapies for a wide range of diseases, including cancer. Subcutaneous injection is the preferred method of delivery, but its usefulness is currently limited by unwanted outcomes such as protein aggregation and gelation that occur for high doses. Previous attempts to address these problems by modifying the amino-acid sequence of potential therapeutics have been expensive and often unsuccessful.

The investigators have recently reported a new method for creating highly concentrated, low-viscosity dispersions of stable protein nanoclusters that are not only of great fundamental interest but also could provide a basis for an unconventional means for solving major challenges in the protein-based therapeutics. However, at present, the answers to basic questions about the origins of the nanoclusters are lacking. Furthermore, the relationships between specific nanocluster characteristics and physical properties of the resulting dispersions are currently unknown.

The Research Alert is an electronic publication from the Office of the Vice President for Research at The University of Texas at Austin. It includes news of research honors and awards, news of research programs and deadlines, researchers quoted in news media, a listing of funding opportunities and a look at a current research project. It is available by e-mail and on the Web.